Well, I dropped Rye off at his fishing tournament bright and early this morning.  It’s a beautiful day here so he should have a good day and I now have some time to myself to piddle as Don is out of town visiting family for the weekend.

As I was driving to the lake I couldn’t help but think that I am a bit concerned these days about keeping Rye on the straight and narrow.   He’s about to turn 13 and he’s definitely getting to that period of life where him and his friends are starting to get a bit wiley.  I mean, they are good kids.  They all pray and all seem to have a good connection to God but still, they are easily sidetracked.  And the night before last a bunch of them spent the night at one of the friend’s house and apparently had quite a time.  And stayed up very late.  Call me a cynic but I can’t imagine that was a tale of purity.

I guess it’s true that if Rye was any old Joe kid with any old Joe steady-Eddy parents I probably would not be too concerned.   I mean, kids will be kids and teens will be teens and Rye has had a great deal of freedom over the years and still continues to have a lot and has always made good decisions so far.  However, I liked excitement in my teen years and Rye’s dad, BigB, was off the charts.  Beginning young and throughout his life he has really struggled with drugs and alcohol, has been to jail many times, and has been to prison.  So, not to overestimate the impact of genetics or anything but it is something to keep in mind.   It would be ignorant not to.

Anyway, as I was driving and thinking I looked to my left and there it was.  An AA house.  Alcoholics Anonymous.  A whole stand alone house just for their meetings.  It even had a sign out front designating it as such.  And there were a bunch of men out front smoking and chatting.  Now, I’m going to be honest, we have lived in this area for many years and I have never seen an AA house anywhere.  And now here we are out in what seems like the middle of nowhere, on the one day in a long time I have even been mulling this issue over in my mind,  and there it was.   Well, of course I took it as a sign.  How could one not?  This didn’t happen by accident.

So I decided,  I am going to take Rye to a few AA meetings and let him see how this all plays out of you aren’t careful or start making bad decisions.  Maybe he could hear some stories of people hitting bottom and what it took to recover and all that that entails.   He’s definitely the type of kid that needs to see things up close and personal and hear the stories straight from the horse’s mouth or he’s not buying it.

Maybe it will have an impact.  Maybe it won’t.  Maybe I don’t need to worry about it all that much.  Maybe he’s got the sense to make good decisions without this kind of exposure.  Maybe he doesn’t.  Who knows.  I do know it can’t hurt him.   It won’t hurt him to go to a few meetings.  And it might really help him.

Preventative measures, I tell myself, preventative measures.

Well, now I have this blog and that will all change.  I can make up for the lost years of undocumented stories and also make up for my largest downfall ever as a parent which is that I have no baby book for Rye.  That’s right.  No baby book.  Actually, I take that back.  I have an actual book.  It’s a really cute classic Winnie The Pooh theme baby book.  It just has nothing in it.  It’s really pathetic.  But I’ll tell you, it’s not without reason.  That was a busy time in my life when he was a baby.  I was a single parent, in the middle of a divorce, involved in a custody battle that was very time consuming and draining, a full-time graduate student, and a part-time employee at the University I was attending.

Anyway, things are different now and I have the time to write.  And I have the venue to do it.  So, document away, I say to myself.

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Yesterday was a long day for everyone over here.  By the time I picked up Rye from school I would say we were all a little fried and really ready for the long weekend (no school today).  Rye wanted to have a friend over.  I said fine.  We bring the friend home with us and arrive to find out we don’t have power in the house due to a fallen tree or something in the area so we all sit around the house waiting for the power to be restored.  In an effort to entertain us, Rye and and his friend start singing hip hop songs and dancing around a bit.

And then it happens.

They start singing the song “Pop, Lock and Drop It.”  Over and over again.  They are singing and waving their hands in the air like aspiring hip hop singers.  Or like Jamie Kennedy in the movie “Malibu’s Most Wanted”.   Whichever.

It was special.

Then Rye decides he is going to go on the hardwood floor and show me how to do the dance.  At first he starts slow.  ‘So mom’, he says, ‘you pop (meaning pop your booty out), lock (lock that position) and drop it (you stay in that position and drop it to a squat position).’  He does it a few time very slowly for me to see.

Pop… lock… and drop it.  Slowly.  Pop… lock… and drop it.  Pop… lock… and drop it.

Alright.  Got it.

‘Ok, now let’s go full speed,’ he says.

‘Alright,’ I say, ‘do it’.

And he does.

He goes full speed.  Pops his booty out, locks the position, drops to a squat, screams in pain as his knees have just both let out a horrific cracking (dare I say popping) noise, falls back on his bottom, lands on his tailbone on the hardwood floor and then falls over crying from the pain of his knees letting out screaming noises and then the sheer force of his body weight slamming unmercifully and directly square onto his tailbone which hits the unrelenting hardwood floor.

Now, it all happened very quickly and I have to say, me and the friend, despite the fact that we are both very compassionate people, both burst into hysterical laughter.  I mean we had tears coming out of our eyes.

Was in appropriate response?  No.

Was it a mom-of-the-year (or as Don calls it MOY) response?  No.

Was in unavoidable?  Yes.  It was completely automatic.  Because honestly, it was so darn funny.  And luckily Rye saw the humor in it too and after a brief moment of crying and thinking he had permanently damaged his knees and tailbone, he laughed as well.

Now, I won’t bet on it but I’d venture to say it will be a while before we see him do that dance again.

Ah yes, the old “Pop, Lock and Drop It.”

It’s a classic.